


You Know How to Swim

by Relvetica



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: :P, EVER!!, Gen, OH BOY I BET NO ONE HAS WRITTEN ANYTHING ALONG THEEESE LINES BEFORE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 04:36:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10801845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Relvetica/pseuds/Relvetica
Summary: The Winter Soldier catches his breath and takes the time to reflect. Or tries to.





	You Know How to Swim

**Author's Note:**

> Immediately post-Winter Soldier. I know, I'm fourteen years late to this party, but in my defense I wrote this a year ago. When I was thirteen years late to this party.

A while after the failure of his final mission, he came across a library, and he sat still at a table for a while. There were books that said that retrograde amnesia is rarely permenent. His is as extensive as it is because his treatments, over time, have induced brain injury. Are supposed to induce brain injury. It's healing now because he can't find anyone to treat him, though it hasn't been for lack of trying. 

He's not sure where to go; whenever he remembers a location or a person, the spider hole is empty and the contact is gone. Sometimes long gone. All he wants is someone to run diagnostics on his arm. It was damaged slightly during the last mission. When it's in good shape, it's impervious to moisture, but he damaged it and then plunged it into river water.

There are things he can remember. These feel like dreams he had a long time ago, surreal conversations and nonlinear events, and he doesn't put much stock in them. Other things he doesn't remember; he _knows_. When he asks why he knows something and he's told that he remembers it, this isn't the answer he's looking for. Knowing something is never a struggle. He knows languages. He knows his body. His knows his priorities and his equipment and his physical integrity, and the exact horizon of his limits at any given time. 

The books said there was more than one kind of memory. He's disregarded that. Semantics.

He sits underneath an overpass and lets the sound of cars wash over him until it sounds like waves. He presses the ball point of a give-away bank pen to the first page of a unused 2013 planner and slowly writes: _Don't die._ He paused, thinking. _Survival takes precedence over the mission unless stated otherwise._

He can't remember anyone ever stating otherwise, but that doesn't mean anything. He does remember, now, in that jerky half-dreamed way, what his teachers had worked with to impress this rule on him. It was a very old memory, because his Russian was still clumsy and forced, and they didn't understand at first, when they asked him to tell them about a time he thought he might die, that it wasn't a memory from the war. He'd told them more details than he could remember now; now he just remembers saying, _deti, deti._

_Rebyonok?_

_Deti,_ he said.

He doesn't know when or where it happened. He hadn't been old enough to be any good for rescue missions, but he'd certainly been capable of taking them up: not _too_ young, but definitely too young. He doesn't know why the water was so cold or why the beach was so far away. He knows his lungs were burning by the time he reached his objective, and his arms and legs were already turning to lead as he grabbed him and hauled his head above the water. He knows the moment he realized he'd have to swim the same distance back, this time carrying someone. He knows it's when he realized he would die, whether within this moment or another. That there is, in fact, an end to the line.

His life isn't something anyone has bothered measuring in years, but yeah. Definitely too young.

He wonders now why he chose that; it's rendered it more a memory of remembering, even less reliable. He doesn't remember the war very well either, but he knows there were many times he'd looked his death in the face. Maybe he just hadn't been as afraid then. His mortality had already been impressed on him.

He crosses out "die" in the planner and writes "утонуть" above it.

\---

The books said the most recent memories a person has formed are the ones that leave first. Older memories are sturdier, somehow. But memories are still phantoms. He knows he has sisters. He doesn't remember how many. He suspects he's remembering the same people at different ages. _Deti. Detski._

_Two or more sisters,_ he writes. He hesitates, and adds, _One brother._

He stares at that for a long time. He crosses out the entire line, and the pen hovers over the page.

One of his sisters wanted to be a dancer, he thinks. Or... maybe all of them did? But it was so hard. It was... too expensive. The lessons, the shoes. It took up every hour of the day, stretching, balancing, aiming, twisting. It looked so hard, and they were so young, destroying their feet to turn them into pretty little swans, level six. He had wrapped his hands with bandages, not his feet. His knuckles. Both hands, his real hands. He doesn't remember why, but he knows everything that's flesh bleeds eventually.

_Two or more sisters and the man on the bridge,_ he writes.

\---

He doesn't know his name. He remembers what the man in the river said is his name (the man in the river is the man on the bridge, he's decided -- he isn't positive, because the man on the bridge is only a handful of flashes now, but it seems likely) but it isn't a name he knows. When he thinks now, though, he realizes he doesn't know what else it would be. He must have a name. Everyone has a name. But no one has needed a name for him in a long time. It's been lost to the treatments.

If there will be no more treatments, and subsequently no more missions, then he doesn't need a designation. There will be nothing more for him to forget; he can be nothing himself. Sometimes that's comforting, but most of the time when he finds a place he knows used to be a safehouse and is now only an empty lot, he feels lost. Whatever he is, he's the only one left. He has no keepers.

When it rains, he closes the planner and tips his face back to the water. It streams around the plates set into his arm. If it's damaged, there's nothing he can do. He can't even look at it properly.

The feeling that there is something he should know but doesn't is a strange one, though, and it doesn't go away. He doesn't know why he has this arm. It's very powerful, but it's sometimes delicate, and it doesn't heal when left alone like the rest of his body. It's heavy. He knows his collarbone and spine have been reinforced to support the weight of it; he knows he's had to adjust his sense of internal balance to move normally. But these are things that must have happened a long time ago, because he doesn't recall ever feeling the sense of unbalance that would have forced him to adapt. That would have felt wrong enough to leave a strong impression.

When he tries to focus on his body's sense of mismatch, a different and unrelated image flashes to mind instead, a man he fought briefly on the helicarrier. He'd had military equipment that mimicked wings to an uncanny degree, allowing him to swoop and dive like a raptor with automatic weapons instead of talons. It was incredible to watch, and even as he watched him he rapidly tallied up his own equipment, pulled out his grappling hook and fired it, ripping the man from the sky to within his own range of attack. He then forcefully detached one of the wings to ensure the man stayed down, and he moved on.

It shouldn't be relevant, but he muses over that handful of seconds long enough that he decides to write it down. You can see the shape of things in shallow water better than you can estimate their distance or scale. _Was unable to compensate for speed and distance against enemy unit utilizing unknown flight apparatus. Disabled apparatus with hookshot. Removed enemy unit from obstructing objective._ A mission report style of recollection isn't what he's trying to record, though, and he rereads it with mild frustration.

_Saw something incredible,_ he writes on the line below, like an annotation. _Destroyed it._

"Incredible" isn't a word that comes to mind very often. It's imprecise and opinionated. His primary associations with it are four color panels. Reading that line over again and again, what he feels isn't something new or strange, not a revelation, but something very familiar. Harrowingly familiar. 

If only now, in retrospect.


End file.
